Feeling the stare from behind. On the tip of the tongue. Say something or not? Say nothing...

...want to say. Want to kiss. Run away. Pulling hair. Biting nails.

Wanting to know. About the other.

That's a boy. Hidden behind his unkept hair and his clothes. His portrait gazes from a six square meter canvas. Next to him, a girl, frivolous, kissed, ready to jump. Injured.

These images are from her: Heike Kati Barath. She often stands before them, looking, assessing their gaze. Or she happily reencounters the familiar faces when she sees them at one of her exhibitions.

Oil, lacquer, acrylic, foam insulation, large surfaces differentiated by their brush work, button eyes, soft lines, strings of acrylic, the background in soft focus only recognizable because the body isn't rectangular, otherwise it fills the entire canvas, leaving the viewer no chance to get by.

Barath works up such fine traits out of these planes that one has to constantly double check whether or not the girl, or the boy, is really looking the way that we think they are looking. While looking, we ourselves become aware of our own inadequate perception: observe, rate and remember. Concepts become experiences again, they dissolve into a process. Like children, we learn all over again. Discovering ourselves naive and infantile.

Thus the images open up, become stories, personal stories, viewer's stories. Heike Kati Barath's images give the impulse, the reason, the moment, the in-between. The possible. They are not so much depiction as interaction. An 'I' arises over a 'you'. Identification over disassociation.